Return to Lundazi

John Grimond, our former foreign editor, revisits the corner of Zambia where he taught in 1965

GOD must have been working to a budget when He came to make Zambia for, after the spectacular creation of the Victoria Falls and a few lesser bursts of exuberance, it was nearly all monotonous bush for the rest of the country, and by the time He got to Lundazi the cash was clearly at an end. Lundazi is an unremarkable place, way out east on the Malawi border, and on the road to nowhere much. The only town—township, technically—in an area the size of Ohio, it has just one building of note, a hotel built in imitation of a small Norman castle by a district commissioner in the late 1940s, when the country was run by the British. The Castle is a charming curiosity, but from its battlements the horizons hold none of the views for which Africa is famous. For the most part, Lundazi is quiet, mildly decrepit and, in the dry season at least, always dusty. Yet, for all that, it is unpretentiously welcoming, and its people are delightful.

So it certainly seemed in 1965, when I went there first, as a British 18-year-old filling the gap between school and university, and so it seemed again when I revisited it a few months ago for the first time in 40 years. In 1965 Zambia, hitherto called Northern Rhodesia, was enjoying its first year of independence from Britain. The hated federation with Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland had been dissolved at the end of 1963, and Ian Smith's Southern Rhodesia had not yet made its unilateral declaration of independence, which, when it came (in November 1965), was to bring turmoil to the entire region. Zambia, with huge reserves of copper, was potentially rich. It was led by a man of some decency, Kenneth Kaunda, and, all in all, there was a sense of hope. I shared it.

The next decades, though, were not good for Africa. Political instability, economic stagnation, corruption and civil breakdown overtook many of its countries, and Zambia had its share of setbacks. Yet it suffered no military coup (overlooking a little incident in 1997), no civil war and certainly no genocide. To people outside its borders, its travails were portrayed more in the statistics of international reports than in images on the evening news. So how had things changed in out-of-the-way Lundazi?

Not much, to judge by the state of the road I was again travelling, 40 years on. The road is important to Lundazi. There is only one of significance, which runs the 186km (116 miles) from Chipata, which was called Fort Jameson—or, more familiarly, Fort Jim—until 1969. Chipata is the capital of the Eastern province, and pretty much the end-point of the Great East Road from the capital, Lusaka, so virtually everyone going to or from Lundazi uses the road from Chipata. In 1965 it was an unpaved artery, alternately hard and corrugated, then soft and sandy, always dusty and often, when unmarked bends or unseen chasms suddenly appeared, rather dangerous. That was in the dry season. In the rainy season it could be so muddy as to be impassable. Wet or dry, there would be monkeys in the trees, nightjars in the headlights and silent figures walking, running or mounted—often two at a time—on unlit bicycles. Sometimes, too, there would be huge trucks, throwing up clouds of dust and threatening to send any would-be overtaker hurtling into the bush.

The road has since been tarred, and a 4X4 can now bowl along the first 130km of the approach to Lundazi at some speed. But then, at Kazonde, the tar stops and thereafter, despite the patching and grading in progress, all vehicles must slow to little more than walking pace to navigate the slopes, trenches and pot-holes of the remaining 50km. Repairs had been started before but the contractors stopped work when they were not paid, and in 2004 locals removed many of the new metal culverts in order to fashion tools from them. The people here are so poor that all road signs—there are not many—are deliberately perforated, for otherwise they would soon be removed and turned into pots and pans.

Many sights along the road are unchanged after 40 years: the women carrying huge baskets on their heads, or bundles of logs, or drums of water; the broken-down lorries, one whose driver is asleep beneath the back axle, another whose sackclothed cargo has tumbled off and burst on the ground; the ox-carts, the bicycles, the wayside hawkers selling bananas, charcoal and sugarcane. But there are changes, too. For the first 60km going north, schools, brick houses and tin roofs suggest greater prosperity. The source of this seems to be a new diversification of crops. In the past, farming was almost entirely a subsistence affair with little grown except for maize, and the granaries visible from the road show that this remains the staple food. Now, though, there is evidence of cash crops: the tobacco sheds just outside Chipata and a store 115km beyond; two lorries laden with cotton; people selling sweet potatoes; patches of cassava under cultivation. And minds are evidently fed too. A sign at Lumezi points to a secondary school that was not there in 1965. More sinisterly, after 87km, an orphanage now stands by the road. This turns out to be a portent of one of the biggest changes since the 1960s.

Courage, Brother

Education had never been a priority for the authorities in Northern Rhodesia. The country had only three secondary schools for Africans in the mid-1950s, and two of those were run by churches. An expansion began in 1960, with talk of a secondary school for the capital of each of the seven rural provinces, but it was not until independence that one was opened in Lundazi. It was a simple affair: two classes to start with, all boys, four teachers (I was the fourth), few books and not much else. The dearth of equipment extended to hymn books, important as they were in a part of Africa which still showed the influence of David Livingstone and his Presbyterian beliefs. One or two hymns, however, had been cyclostyled, taught to the boys and committed to memory. “Courage, Brother, do not stumble” was particularly popular. Each day, morning assembly would start with the words, “We will now sing our hymn.” A pause followed, just long enough to allow the possibility of suspense as to what the choice would be. Then, almost invariably, came, “Let us sing ‘Courage, brother',” and the air swelled with a lowing of deep male voices.

The headmaster was Arthur Lewanika, a scion of the Lozi royal family whose kingdom, Barotseland, lay in western Zambia. He and his deputy, Roger Zulu, had been the only teaching staff until I and another recruit, Alfred Zaranyika, a Southern Rhodesian, arrived. Neither Alfred nor I had had any training as teachers, and I at least had no books for the lessons in French, maths and physics that I was supposed to give. It is difficult to believe that I taught anyone anything. Still, I had heard in Lusaka before returning to Lundazi that about ten of my former pupils had eventually graduated from university and some had become engineers (Alex Barton Manda), accountants (Major Mkandawire) or lawyers (Masuzu Zimba). At independence in 1964, the country had had fewer than 100 graduates.

The students, who came from far and wide within the surrounding area, were boarders, and so the school was always busy. But life in Lundazi, a town of perhaps 2,000-3,000 in those days, was quiet. In the evenings, the only noises apart from human voices were the hiss of the Tilley lamps that provided our light—no electricity then—and the calls of the hyenas that sometimes ate the Lewanikas' chickens and often came right up to the house that Alfred and I shared. The main amusements were provided by the trials of daily life: Alfred's mile-long sprint pursued by a swarm of bees; my old car catching alight as I drove past the market one day; Alfred's attempt to extend the life of his car battery by warming it up in the oven, an experiment that caused Arthur huge amusement when “over-baking” led to muffled explosions and quantities of boiling acid that seeped on to our kitchen floor.

It was almost impossible to get a car mended in Lundazi, or even to replace a battery. The shops were basic. Food could be bought in the market and sometimes people would come to the door offering a (live) chicken or some oranges. But Alfred was always scornful about the lack of choice: people were so much more enterprising, he said, in Southern Rhodesia (that was, of course, before Robert Mugabe had done his best to wreck the country). Anything even slightly sophisticated—oil lamps, blankets, cloth for chitenges, the nearly universal garment for women in those days—was available only from the shops owned by “Asians”, notably Mulla Stores, founded by old Mr Mulla, who had made his way to Lundazi from Gujarat via Mozambique in the 1930s.

For a drink or a meal out, the place to go was the Castle, which was presided over by Lyn Jonquière, the only other “European”, as whites were then called, in Lundazi. The Castle was where visiting politicians, contractors and civil servants would stay. It was kept spick and span by Mrs Jonquière. Of an evening, she could be found behind the bar, genially dispensing cold Castles (the hotel shared a name with a popular beer) or Portuguese wine brought in from Mozambique, Zambia's neighbour to the east, while Jim Reeves played on the gramophone. Thanks to its generator, the Castle had electricity.

You do not need a generator today in Lundazi: electricity is (usually) available from the Malawian national grid across the border, and the Castle now has television. It does not, however, have running water—except through the roof in the rainy season. The building is in a sad state, though its new leaseholder, Chifumu Banda, promises improvements.

Mr Banda, a native of Lundazi who is now a prominent lawyer in Lusaka, had warned me that I would see that Lundazi was now “worse off”. The school, though, is vastly improved. The four teachers and 70 or so students have become 43 teachers and 864 students, and they occupy a bigger site. Though no one remembers any of the original staff, Arthur's name is memorialised in the name of one of the four boarding houses. As for the students' names, neither their first nor their surnames seem to have changed much: there are Ndhlovus, Phiris, Nyirendas and Bandas galore, preceded perhaps by Best, Gift, Major, Mercy or Memory, even if, on this occasion, I meet no Time, Meat or Section Eight.

No more cocktails here

The school has its own water (pumped from three boreholes), a fish pond, four plump pigs and several sheep and goats. It grows its own vegetables. But only rarely do the students eat meat, and the relentless diet of nshima—maize porridge—has apparently provoked protests in the not-too-distant past. Little money has been available for maintenance, but broken windows are being replaced, prefects now have “executive neckties”, the library contains a modest variety of books and there are ten computers, though not, as yet, an internet connection. (High telecoms charges and an overburdened relay station still keep most of Lundazi offline, though mobile phones have just arrived.) Another sign of change is that, in place of the “Procrastination is the thief of time” written on the blackboard by Alfred in 1965, a notice on a door now reads, “Don't trust corrupt politicians.”

The new plague

Basic tuition is provided free, but the fees for boarding and any extra lessons come to nearly $200 a year, and uniform costs almost another $40. For most families, that is a fortune: about 70% of Zambians live on less than $1 a day. But in the past a family that could muster enough to start sending a child to school would usually be able to see the endeavour through. Today that is often untrue, simply because so many families are falling apart. In the list of students, the letter S (for a “single” orphan, ie, a child who has lost one parent) or D (for a “double” orphan) occurs ever more often against the names as the classes grow older: 14 in Grade Nine, 60 in Grade Ten. The cause is AIDS. In total, over 120 of the 864 students have lost one or both parents to this latter-day plague.

Lundazi is far from insouciant about AIDS. The district has an AIDS co-ordinator, Christa Nyirenda, who struggles to carry out her work in the face of a constant lack of money. The churches also do their best. The Rev Frighted Mwanza's Presbyterian church, for example, is helping to look after several orphans and 55 others who are HIV-positive, some of them chronically ill. And along the road from the Castle, the Thandizani (meaning “Let's help one another”) centre also offers advice, support and HIV testing. Set up in 1999 in a former cocktail bar, whose name is still clearly legible outside, it is considered a model non-governmental organisation, but it does not offer treatment.

That is done at Lundazi district hospital, or rather it is meant to be done there. The difficulty is that the hospital is old (1950s vintage), has only two doctors (for all the 290,000 people in the district) and has to charge for the anti-retroviral drugs that can arrest the ravages of AIDS in infected people. The very poor, about 20% of those who receive these drugs, get them free; the others must pay about $10 a month. The result is that only 114 people are getting treatment out of more than 500 who are known to need it. In reality, hundreds, if not thousands, should be receiving drugs. That is evident both from the number of orphans in the school and from a sign not far from the hospital: “Coffin Workshop”.

Fortunately, coffins are not the only source of new jobs in Lundazi. The second-hand clothes market that has sprung up is another. On a dusty patch of ground now stands rack upon rack of western clothes, made perhaps in China or other parts of Asia but already worn in Europe or America and then given away to charities to be sold, for very little, all over Africa, even in places like Lundazi. This phenomenon, known as salaula, explains why so few of the women along the road now wear chitenges, and also why a man on a bicycle too poor to have shoes may be wearing a formal dress shirt. The trade provides T-shirts and skirts and trousers for many who could not afford them in the past, and jobs for those who sell the clothes. But it has made it difficult for Zambian textile producers to compete; this is dumping in the true sense of the word.

More hopeful for Lundazi is the slow, belated improvement in agriculture. On the outskirts of town are some new tobacco sheds, built by Stancom, an American multinational. It provides loans to small farmers, trains them in agronomy and sells them seeds and fertiliser, as well as the saplings they must plant if they cut other trees down for fuel to flue-cure their crop. A Malawian company, Limbe Leaf, has also come to Lundazi, as have several cotton companies—Dunavant, an American firm, Clark Cotton, from South Africa, and Chipata Cotton, a Chinese joint-venture. Lundazi now accounts for about 12% of Zambia's cotton production, and there is talk of Dunavant building a ginnery.

For all these welcome developments, agriculture around Lundazi is woefully undeveloped. Many people have gone hungry in the past few months thanks to a poor harvest: instead of falling evenly through the 2004-05 growing season, the rains came all at once, mostly early on. Yet the land is good. It could provide much more food and cash crops too, perhaps two harvests a year, with proper irrigation. But only now are some of the dams of the colonial era being restored to use, after years of neglect and silting up.

Hope on hold

It is time to leave Lundazi. Outside Mulla Stores, which seems to have had not even a lick of paint in 40 years, a few people are chatting. One or two others are bicycling from the direction of the boma, the administrative centre. Here again not much has changed. The impression is reinforced on the journey back along the pot-holed road to Chipata, even after a brief stop to greet Father Morrison and the other Catholic Fathers at Lumezi mission. But then there are the signs, really quite a lot of them, to the schools: primary schools, “basic” schools (which give a couple of years of secondary education) and Lumezi's secondary school. That is encouraging. So is the farming. But every so often are reminders of a darker side of the new reality: branches, laid down on the road to indicate a funeral. Bicyclists are expected to dismount, and trucks and cars to slow down, out of respect. I assume, perhaps wrongly, that AIDS has claimed another vicitm.

I had been prepared for most of what I found in Lundazi: I knew that half a century ago Zambia and South Korea had had roughly the same income per person, and now Korea's was 32 times greater. So I was expecting the accumulated evidence of 40 years of needless poverty, misgovernment and dashed hopes. Many of those dashed hopes I shared. But my main regret was that, back in 1965, I had not been able, instead of French and physics, to teach Korean studies, even if I had had no books. Perhaps it is not too late for someone else.